Six years ago I had the pleasure of beginning a long-term collaboration with Wayne McGregor on the art and science of dance making. Whenever Mr. McGregor makes a new dance with his company Random Dance a few students and I set up six or seven HD cameras for the entire ‘making’ period and begin the long process of making sense of what goes on. We interview the choreographer, the dancers, the associate choreographer and at times we conduct experiments with the dancers. The result has been a string of surprising findings about creativity, memory, the nature of practice and physical communication. I will present several of these findings with the aid of video footage and then discuss why our findings generalize to creativity, memory etc more generally.

David Kirsh is Professor and past chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD. He was educated at Oxford University (D.Phil), did post doctoral research at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and has held research or visiting professor positions at MIT and Stanford University. He has written extensively on situated and distributed cognition and especially on how the environment can be shaped to simplify and extend cognition, including how we intelligently use space, and how we use external representations to amplify and speed up thought. He runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at UCSD where the focus is human-world coupling, and designing environments to make us smarter. A recent project focuses on how humans think with their body, specifically in dance making and choreographic cognition, and on distributed creativity in movement design. This study is based on his six-year collaboration with Wayne McGregor and Random Dance. He is co-Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and he is on the board of directors for the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.